Gore Vidal calls for investigation into what "Bush junta" knew about 9/11

By Advocate.com Editors

Originally published on Advocate.com October 29 2002 1:00 AM ET

The [London] Observer reports that out author Gore Vidal has called for an investigation into whether the Bush administration deliberately chose to ignore warnings of Al Qaeda's plans for September 11, 2001. In a 7,000-word essay titled "The Enemy Within," published in Sunday's Observer, Vidal writes that what he calls the "Bush junta" used the attacks as a smokescreen to enact an already-existing agenda of invading Afghanistan and curtailing civil liberties in the United States. "We still don't know by whom we were struck that infamous Tuesday or for what true purpose," Vidal writes. "But it is fairly plain to many civil libertarians that 9/11 put paid not only to much of our fragile Bill of Rights but also to our once-envied system of government, which had taken a mortal blow the previous year when the Supreme Court did a little dance in 5/4 time and replaced a popularly elected President with the oil and gas Bush-Cheney junta."